If I had a penny for every time I hear this.. yes they had big layoffs, but they also hired like crazy for a long time.
Fuchsia is maybe 1/4 product and the rest is a long term infrastructure investment. If Google had lost interest they’d have no problem shutting it down by now, for instance stadia rose and fell in a shorter time span than all of fuchsia.
I don’t know whether fuchsia will “make it”, heck a frustrated enough SvP can probably kill it if they really wanted to. However, fuchsia never lived in the same world as the rest of Google, or even the platform & ecosystems org (Android & ChromeOS), not really.
Nobody ever expected a new OS and kernel to be a mainstream success in single digit years. It’s an insane project to take on, and ironically that insanity keeps a lot of the short term opportunists away, specifically the kind that leaves a crater after them when they leave..
> If Google had lost interest they’d have no problem shutting it down by now
It does feel like they’ve lost a lot of interest in Android. It’s too big for Google to just close, but I could see them selling it. If that happens, hopefully it’s to a Microsoft but chances are they will screw us all and sell it to Oracle or Xiaomi.
But there are a lot of things that will die before Android or Fuschia. Here’s a list of 270 Google projects (past and present)[1]. I learned about Google Sunroof through this list (rooftop solar calculator) and it’s pretty neat.
IMO they are aiming to replace Android with Fuchsia. Because they have full control of Fuchsia, and so-so control of Android. They don't need to sell Android. They can just let it die on its own in AOSP which is already nonviable without Google's services.
Ouch, not a good look when people lose almost complete faith in your hardware products. Every one I know of has been shut down at this point. Why would I buy a Google Hardware ever? Especially considering how they treated the Onhub...
Pixel still had recent major software issues (Crashing when calling emergencies, a year after the first reports), or ongoing issue, like massive battery drains in certain conditions.
I bought a Pixel 6, I don't think I'll buy another Pixel again.
The official pixel case got destroyed due to wear in not even a year (my own 3D printed case in TPU now lasted longer than google one).
The official pixel case also caught some dust and scratched the glass of the back.
The pixel without a case is so slippery it slip alone on any surface not perfectly flat.
> The official pixel case got destroyed due to wear in not even a year
welcome to the "official case" club. all my iphone cases get destroyed in max 6 months, with one lasting less than 3 months. during the course of an iphone (2 years) i go thru 5-6 "official" cases.
I bought an Otterbox case that has lasted 2 years and is only just now starting to show some wear and rubber/plastic separation. My Apple case was a bit embarrassing to pull out in public after only 6 months.
you can never put it past Google to just kill anything up to Google Search, but the Pixel is a success and it doesn't make sense to compare a high-end line of products on a per-unit basis to cheapo phones like TLCs
for instance the most profitable watch companies in the world are Timex, Rolex and Omega, and they have a combined market share of a fraction of a percent and on a per-unit basis they don't sell, combined, a thousandth of the units Casio alone sells (by the way most smartwatches are sell at nearly no profit and Apple's watch business has been losing money for a while)
> but the Pixel is a success and it doesn't make sense to compare a high-end line of products on a per-unit basis to cheapo phones
Compare it to high end products then, and you'd still come up short.
There's also the reason why I pointed out "in the context of Google, and Google products": it's a tiny product made at great effort and expense that Google clearly doesn't know what to do about (they haven't even supported their own phones for more than three years until recently).
compare it to high-end lines and Google is #3 in some markets and #4 in others, which is unmitigated success
companies don't get to #3 or #4 in some of the most lucrative sectors in the world and then just decide to close shop because they're not #1 or #2
there are a bunch of profitable companies that ONLY make money in Pixel's sector, are recognised brands and they are already behind the Pixel in market share
it's essentially like being Rolex in the watch business (number 1 or 2 in profit depending on market) and just closing shop because Casio sells 1000x+ more watches
"While both Honor and Google’s share of the premium smartphone segment more than doubled in 2022 from 2021, they still only account for around 1% of the pie, so they are still significantly smaller players."
Behind Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi.
To put it in perspective: Pixel was launched 6 years ago which replaced Google Nexus, launched 13 years ago. It's a very minor product that Google has been pouring money into with little to no effect.
last time I researched into it last year, Google Pixel was already the biggest division in hardware for Google in terms of profit (above Nest and Home) and had better-looking numbers in profitability than all the main players in hardware except Microsoft - and that included Apple for the first time
since Google killed Stadia and perhaps has no chance at the console business, it strategically looks like a terrible idea to exit the mobile hardware division, but again, with Google you never know
the image Google has created around having essentially no commitment to any business lines makes it hard for them to enter the console market with longer cycles, but doesn't hurt them as much in the mobile market as phones are replaced often anyway
PS: Pixel is just Google's newer mobile hardware brand, for me there is no real difference with Nexus in that respect - just a rebranding
> compare it to high-end lines and Google is #3 in some markets and #4 in others, which is unmitigated success
Define: High end
Define: "some markets"
Also: Pixel isn't one phone. It's Pixel 7 Pro (premium) and Pixel 7 (sorta medium) and Pixel 6a (cheap)
Also: We're talking about Google, 80% of whose revenue comes from online advertisement. Spending a lot of effort on a relatively low-volume hardware product that may be some number in some markets is not nearly enough to guarantee long-term viability of the product. I'm surprised Google has stuck by Pixel (given the very spotted history of the phone) at all.
Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
GOOG went wrong when they stopped using XMPP, CALDAV and forked Webkit. Those actions broke cross platform development and re-ignited the browser wars. I see those moves as totally motivated by privacy invasion of the users.
Never trust a free product with advertising.
I've never worked at Google so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position.
Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school.
It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.
Put in concrete terms, do you want to be one of the two engineers exiled to maintaining Reader because you pissed someone off to keep the geeks off Google’s back?
Not everyone wants to chase the new shiny. There are many folks out there who enjoy the challenge of working in a legacy database. Blue sky folks see a rats nest of wires, maintenance engineers see cable porn in potentia.
Those projects have real difficulties to retain enough developers even to keep lights on. And even higher-ups want, they can’t force allocate developers (in Google’s current power structure) other than providing some incentives including promotion.
The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.
From what I've heard even their performance reviews heavily focus on bringing new products to market or working on exciting projects, so even if Google needs it there's a chance you're at the top of the list for layoffs anyway.
They need to create a subsidiary of Alphabet called Google Maintenance or something and explicitly it only does boring maintenance and promotes on a mechanized schedule.
For the kind of money that's on offer? I would imagine it would suit a lot of people. Fix a few bugs, add some diagnostics, see what the customers think should be changed? Why wouldn't you, it seems like the sort of thing you could get someone to do.
Because at most companies it’s probably a recipe to not get bonuses, RSUs, promotions, good reviews, and other teams may not want to touch you—out of sight out of mind.
And guess who is high on the list if cuts are to be made?
Plenty of people would take a steady non-exciting maintenance job, especially if it paid remotely close to what Google pays. Many would even prefer it to a more exciting job.
There are thousands of companies that manage to maintain much more boring apps with salaries much lower than Google's.
This comes up literally every google thread. At this point it feels like a meme which originated on HN at some point. People keep repeating because it sounds plausible.
The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated.
And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false.
New grads aren't making any big decisions about products.
And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.
The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship.
Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.
My point is that the promo process being the root cause of this comes up often but doesn't really have any evidence to back it up except a long chain of repetitions.
> Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN.
Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions.
Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.
Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another.
In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.
Bard should have been released as an upgrade to Google Assistant imo. Imagine how much better a voice assistant would be if you could actually hold a decent back and forth conversation with it without having to know the exact phrasing needed to accomplish something.
Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain English and respond in a helpful manner.
I don't think it would be an upgrade at this point yet. Bard / LLM lacks precision in ways that are pretty important when carrying out the user's wishes.
IIRC google has purposely kept assistant stunted and lifeless. Remember how originally it was the inhuman "Okay Google" key phrase? They did explicitly to keep people from humanizing it. Also its the only assistant with no name, its just called "assistant"
It wasn't until Alexa and Siri gained traction that they let "Hey google" slip in.
>Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.
This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context?
The prevailing sentiment is google is flakey. Don’t rely on their stuff.
Now removing redundant services is one thing. But from the outside it looks like they don’t care about regaining confidence. And they don’t care about creating new stable products that I want.
Did they really think Stadia would be an instant success with their shit reputation in a market that has been already carved up by the incumbents? A naïve observer would say it would take years and a ton of money.
Remember how Microsoft was flailing for what seemed like forever under Ballmer, and now in what still feels to me like a relatively short period of time under Nadella, they seem to be thriving again? Yeah... leadership actually matters a lot...
Why would management care? Ads, the entire point of google as a business, will continue making gobs of money no matter what. The point of these toy side projects is to entertain developers in between "track users more" and "Show users more ads" tickets.
The hardware is a big up-front cost. If you want a gaming PC, that can potentially set you back $1000 or more, and there's ongoing maintenance cost as you have to keep upgrading your graphics card if you want to keep playing the latest titles. Stadia Pro at $10/month was the equivalent of building a $600 PC every 5 years, plus with a bunch of free games thrown in over that time. Buying the latest console can set you back hundreds of dollars in one go, and now you also have vendor lock-in (which means you have to commit to one platform, or buy multiple consoles each generation).
The marketing was... not executed well. Most people didn't realize that you could actually just buy games on the platform and play them without paying the monthly subscription for Pro. The backbone of the business model was supposed to be driven by that 30% cut of game sales revenue that most gaming platforms / stores take.
The infrastructure was supposed to be further subsidized by selling off-peak compute as a cloud service. That never materialized.
The exclusives were lackluster compared to other platforms (Breath of the Wild? Halo Infinite? God of War Ragnarok?), and leadership shuttered the in-house game studios before they were able to release much of anything.
Beyond all that -- there were plenty of features that owning your own hardware simply could not compete with. Just to list a few:
- Not having to wait for video game downloads was an incredibly underrated feature -- being able to start playing a game within seconds meant you could play a game immediately after an impulse purchase, rather than having to wait half an hour (100GB download at 500Mbps) first.
- Family sharing meant that you could play Cyberpunk 2077 (which, by the way, launched with serious performance issues across most platforms... but played smoothly on Stadia), while the kids next to you on the couch played, I dunno, Paw Patrol, all on hardware you already owned, e.g. your laptop, or phone, or the Chromecast that came with the founder's edition (also 100% optional).
- You could seamlessly continue a game across multiple devices -- play a game at home on your TV, then continue at a friend's house on your phone.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what.
The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks).
Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.
It could be. I don't think Google are likely to just roll over and let OpenAI/MSFT take that market though. Obviously Google will try to compete. Maybe they'll fail, maybe they won't. If nothing else, as a user of these tools, it's going to be exciting to see some innovation in search UIs for the first time in decades.
They were saying on the all-in podcast that Google is under lots of political pressure from all sides and that makes it difficult for them to launch controversial tech like LLMs. Bard feels very hobbled and, for example, refuses to answer any medical questions.
I'm just trying to emphasize that most people only care about results. I think it minimizes Google's problems to think it is some technical stack problem. The problem is that Google has a disconnect with some quanity of users on what good search results look like. If Google and the users can't agree on the correct search results... Who is wrong the person doing the searching or google?
I can't even figure out what I'm looking at when searching google. I get completely overwhelmed. I remember when I use to be able to craft google searches and get one result.
I bet OpenAI is losing money on every prompt interaction you do. Estimates of the computational power required and the number of users, are that if was not for Microsoft cash injection it would be bankrupt by now.
There are already lightweight models that are in the ballpark of GPT3.5 that run on (admittedly high end) consumer level hardware. This is with only a few months of development too.
Sure, but it puts Google in a lose-lose situation. If people come to expect the features of ChatGPT, Google will have to add them in and greatly decrease the profitability of search. On top of that, it will cost them 10 times more since they have 10 times the market. They could also ignore ChatGPT, but a portion of their users will migrate to other search engines also costing them money. For Microsoft, search is one of a dozen business lines they are in, what do they care about destroying the profitability of search if it hurts their competitors more?
I keep seeing this – it's a meme at this point – and I don't get it. Answering questions truthfully from a broad set of data while citing sources seems to be ChatGPT's major weakness. It routinely "hallucinates," even with better prompting. It's much better at helping generate prose based on the prompt.
I don't even buy the idea that "exponential growth" will improve things. One of the few things OpenAI is still open about is that they will keep adding more parameters at any cost. Techniques to reinforce truthful responses or even provide confidence based on whether the response involves out-of-sample & out-of-prompt guessing (i.e. BSing) seem not to be a priority.
GPT4 is also much more expensive to use, even at the probably-running-at-a-loss pricing. Accuracy per dollar and/or joule doesn't seem to be increasing too much.
Sure, if we’re changing the complaint from “accuracy won’t get better” to “efficiency won’t get better.”
But I don’t believe that either. Hardware design and manufacturing cycles are long and we’re just now starting to see transformer-optimized HW. Accuracy per dollar and per joule will improve by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.
But then we can move on to percent of human tasks LLMs are suitable replacements for, or the ethics of increasing automation.
I was critiquing accuracy of ChatGPT, which has a certain cost. "Just use GPT4, 5, ..." was the solution proposed in response, but that ain't free. In fact, it's one to two orders of magnitude more expensive.[0] I'm also pessimistic on custom hardware being that much of a help. I read about Cerberus's giant wafer chip in 2019[1] and even saw it at a conference in early 2020 pre-pandemic, and I have yet to see that make orders of magnitude worth of improvement. The attention mechanism simply requires huge amounts of multiply-adds, especially at GPT-scale. That costs energy and cash no matter how much custom hardware you throw at it.
> if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely)
I started using Bing ~2 years ago. At the start, I used Google to get alternate results for about 1/4 of searches. Today? I drop to Google a couple of times a month, at most, usually when searching for something very ambiguous. I don't even live in the US.
It definitely does have an important impact. They need to find their next big revenue stream, and reputational damage makes that harder. But so does maintaining unprofitable products! This is just a super difficult position for them. They need to try new things, but anything they try needs to work well at scale out of the gate and also be maintained indefinitely in order to avoid any reputational damage.
But it's not a unique problem. I think their peers in the giant mature technology company business tend to take fewer shots and put more investment in the ones they do take.
But they also still kill products eventually. I can't load music on the iPod shuffle I still have in a drawer. My windows 95 disks aren't very useful. The Amazon store I did Christmas shopping at a couple years ago is some kind of boutique clothing store now.
But I do think Google's decisions always seem to feel more sudden, that once they give up on a product, they pull the band-aid off way more quickly. And I do think they seem to take more shots that don't work out.
I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive. I'm occasionally involved some of those types of vendor decisions, and I imagine others in similar positions feel the same way, so I can't imagine this is all theoretical fake losses they've suffered from this MO. I don't know how you'd even begin to measure the amount of revenue opportunities lost in this way, but I will say this: I'm really glad I'm not a part of Google's marketing department.
Even G-Suite isn't really getting that much support, it's on life support at best. There's so many missing features and bugs and just painfully unergonomic workflows that have been ignored for 10+ years at this point; the long overdue and minimal UI facelift recently didn't really solve any pain points.
It is not compatible with a lot of stuff. Can't subscribe to youtube premium family. Can't use android automotive. Can't use this that etc. I switched to my old basic google account for google services and probably move my domains away from gsuite at this point.
I still have the weird issue where I have a google domain with email and stuff, and the same email address is somehow also a separate google account of the personal variety.
No idea how it somehow kinda works and when it’ll finally explode in my face.
You would think this, but one wrong move and its all gone. In the process of migrating away from GSuite for my personal domain/email hosting, my had-already-existed-prior-to-GSuite google account was closed., unrecoverably as far as I can tell. I lost a literal lifetimes worth of school and personal work that I had naively assumed was safe, and of course there is no actual support available to a one man closed GSuite account.
Get your domain hosted by another service, pronto. You're risking losing everything if Google decides to brick your account(s) by decision or accident.
I have a backup of my email, and my domain DNS/registrar is not Google, so the real worst I'll be hit with is a loss of email for a bit as the DNS updates.
oh no, I hate crossing registrar and other providers, even using (say) godaddy for DNS and registrar weirds me out; too many chances something goes horribly wrong (and then you can't transfer the domain).
Just got a new car with Android Automotive and this is incredibly aggravating. Maybe it's for the best that I use a dummy gmail account with the service but it just shows I'm paying Google to be a lesser class citizen and maybe it's time to migrate the whole thing.
Nothing you've said here has prevented the last 4 companies I've worked for from using it, though. One of those companies is a very large, public company. It seems like people are still buying it.
As far as I can tell, Google, culturally, just hates maintenance. Or practically anything that's not a product launch. Ask anyone who's done much development on Android—eternal bugs (I've seen people provide patches and beg to get them applied on bugs years and years old, and be ignored), half-assed implementations of all kinds of things, poor docs often with outdated info, mediocre architectural direction—and that's on a major product!
I think it's some combo of an organizational/internal-incentives failure, and a cultural thing where all these "geniuses" they hire can't be bothered to do any boring shit, to include, sometimes, properly finishing features they start developing.
Why would Bard get axed? Or do you mean Bard in its current form? Last I heard they mentioned about rolling out higher-scale models, since apparently current models were 'efficient' ones, to see if the demand can be met, according to them.
>It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.
Reputation may not affect Google's ad based revenue, but it absolutely affects their ability to profit in lines of business outside of ads.
Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
>Surely the people working at Google understand how all these shutdowns look to outsiders, right? I have to imagine so… they’re smart people, and a ton of them lurk here on HN.
Surely the people on Hackrnews understand that no one outside of tech enthusiasts even knows about this, right? I have to imagine so... they're smart people and surely sometimes interact with regular people in real life?!
But on a more serious note: none of these projects have ever had any traction. That's why they're killed!
Try asking anyone who's not in tech but does play videogames what Stadia is. You'll soon find out why it's axed.
Do you think anyone beside who are vocal (HN/tech crowd esp) care about this 'killed by google' and refrain from using their main source of revenue such as Search, Gmail, Android, Youtube, Map, Photos? Zilch.
GCP/Gsuite's money pouring clients are enterprise customers (not HN crowd), who for the large majority won't bother much about that either. So they clearly know their act doesn't actually make a dent in their revenue stream, but in fact that spring cleaning is a win for them.
It happens one "maybe we should use [alternative] until Google gets its act together" at a meeting at a time. Microsoft was still a behemoth when no one still took it seriously outside people who were on a first name basis with a licensing auditor, and it's struggling to gain trust and respect back. Same with IBM, though they seem unconcerned with image. Collapses are never quick or complete at this scale.
It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
of course people do. anytime you have to buy into a google product that could be killed off anytime. It was the primary reason stadia never took off - you had to buy stadia only game licenses that no one was confident would still exist later.
Something I never understood is why not create new products under a different brand name (something not Google associated), try the idea out, and they end up working move them under the Google brand. I feel that would allow the company to continue to experiment with product ideas without damaging their main brand image. Or is that just a naïve take from somewhere who knows nothing about branding and marketing?
Google has already lost the GPT race, so I assume Bard won’t make it past three years from now. Of course, I’d like to eat my words on this in 2026. But much more innovation in GPTs and LLMs is coming from GitHub randoms than Google.
I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.
I actually got a Levi's / google jacquard trucker jacket (on a good sale). It had potential but Google never seemed to do anything with it. It's pretty inconspicuous already but the Google app for it is very limited. If they open source it I think we could have some fun with the tech.
I tried reading the product page an I feel like I'm having a stroke... How hard can it be to explain what it actually is? So far I roughly got "tracker that connects to a trucker jacket". WHAT?
And then all it was was basically a touch sensor for your jacket sleeve, that you can use to control your phone.
"This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said. "
They have insanely expensive multi-year contracts with quite a few huge companies (and probably government agencies, too). You don't just shut GCP down.
Having consulted at government agencies, it’s all AWS and Azure that I’ve seen. There’s a lot of government out there so I wouldn’t be incredibly surprised if somebody somewhere is using GCP but it’s not at all common as far as I can tell.
No, but you could "Google Group" it. Just keep the lights on and not develop it any further and just watch customers leave over time. There might actually be a bunch of corporate customers that would view the static environment as a plus.
I don't really see them shutting down GCP, even if it's a bit anonymous. It is interesting that Google can't turn a profit on GCP, given that both AWS and Azure is doing to well.
I think it's quite unlikely that they will kill off GCP entirely. It's too established, and it is still growing at a rate of around 30-40% year-on-year [1].
What seems more likely is that they shut down an increasing number of individual sub-products, in the way that they are shuttering IoT Core [2]. If they do, then I'm not convinced that will be a bad thing -- a slimmed down, profitable, platform with a well-supported set of core services feels like a safe long-term partner.
A missed opportunity! First you consult on implementing the Google product, then later you consult again to migrate away from it! Double dipping. Bonus points if migrating from the axed Google product to a new Google product.
Google Code Jam was not a product, and it was an event that was a net loss in terms of revenue, which is hard to justify maintaining when you are cutting thousands of jobs.
Google Street View is part of Google Maps, the post even says so.
Google OnHub is a one time hardware product. Nobody is blaming Nintendo for killing the Gameboy Color when it stopped producing it.
I don't see how any of the 6 things mentioned here have been unjustifiably "killed".
Extremely disingenuous point you're making about OnHub. Nintendo didn't remotely remove functionalities from the Gameboy Color. Google did that with OnHub.
Arguing "it's hardware" doesn't work when the features are cloud-based and the company shuts down the servers. It's bait and switch, pure and simple.
So is the expectation for every single cloud-connected item or online product that the servers remain online ad vitam aeternam so that future archeologists can still use the item when it's rediscovered and restored in 10,000 years?
You just have the wrong expectation for online products.
You bought a connected router. Again, you just have the wrong expectation for online products. The fact that it was maintained for 8 years should be praised.
As a software engineer I can see why you say that but as a consumer you have to ask yourself, who does a product that is designed to be reliant on the cloud benefit? Wifi routers with mesh existed before and will continue to exist after the onhub and they don’t require a cloud connection, so it seems like the cloud connection was designed to mostly benefit Google.
As a consumer, especially a tech savvy one we should continue to push tech companies to build products that last and serve the user and not just throw our hands up and say “we have the wrong expectations”
I remember when the cloud started to become a buzzword I thought of it as a tool for people that didn't want to maintain their own local compute resources and a rent seeking business opportunity for people that did. I never imagined that not owning one's data would become the norm. I also have no intention of using cloud services that aren't forced on me.
Have you ever written software in a company as large as Google? I have. It would need massive investments to make a server usable outside of the environment it was originally written for. It's just not viable.
Fair point. Though there's no denying that people only buy this sort of remotely controlled device either because they have no choice or because they expect support for the functionalities they need will last about as long as the hardware itself. At this point this is almost always not the case.
The battery in cartridges has expired in the vast majority of the cases which means you can't save anymore. I don't see any outrage towards Nintendo for that.
There's a bright distinction between natural wear of the product and remote shutdowns.
Analogy: I don't get outraged if my laptop's battery loses capacity or even swells over time. I do get outraged if I can't boot my laptop because it checked with some remote server that decided I'm not allowed to boot it.
My Gameboy still works, my OnHubs are essentially bricked (unless you don’t need access to unimportant features like making changes to the Wi-Fi network settings and add nodes to the mesh network [1])
When hear about hardware products turning into bricks after the manufacturer pulled the plug on cloud services, I wonder how long it will still be legal.
Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline.
In north America, there is a lot of political pressure for some environmental issues but nothing about planned obsolescence.
> Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline.
I'm afraid that in most cases that is just impossible, because the service is essentially all in the "cloud" by design.
Perhaps the company should be forced to sustain service for a minimum warranty period like in the EU with their 2-years minimum legislation, which has cost repercussions onto the user.
But really in most cases the problem is that it's so accepted to be sucked into subscription deals where the company can change their end of the deal at a moment's notice, and where you might just lose a lot of invested time and effort, let alone data and privacy, and essentially nothing of that can be properly compensated.
Why does Google get grilled so badly for pulling products? Don’t other companies do the exact same thing, and isn’t it their full right to abandon projects when it no longer makes sense?
Pretty much every single corporation of that size and age. And many startups too (they call it "pivoting" though - it's not like startup workers complaining over Google here are first in line to maintain failing products forever).
Amazon and Microsoft would have graveyeards just as large, if compiled via the same criteria. You know all that shit Google gets about chat apps? Microsoft has also launched and killed more than a dozen of them. Jeff Bezos used to brag about how many failed products they launched and killed.
So it comes back to the question that ed_mercer had: why is there such a double standard? Why does somebody obsessively maintain that site, and why does a large part of the HN audience love spamming "when will Google cancel search lol" into any discussion about Google, when Amazon putting two bullets into the neck of yet another product goes unnoticed?
> Microsoft has also launched and killed more than a dozen of them
Microsoft is religious about maintaining backward compatibility and support. They also have some concept of service, which makes cancellations smoother. (All this makes product development aware of the costs of abandonment. Google doesn’t have that in its culture, and it’s a constant problem with hiring from them now.)
I think this is what makes the receptions between Microsoft and Google's axings different, the former at least tries to axe things with some cushioning while Google just offs things like it's Tuesday.
Mostly, they really messed up in Win32 => WinRT => UAP => UWP => WinUI 3.0, and .NET Framework to .NET Core, to the point .NET Framework is the "Python 2" of Microsoft's ecosystems, and no one besides WinDev themselves takes WinUI/WinAppSDK seriously.
Why are you and ed_mercer so intent on defending Google here? I mean I HATE Microsoft and I have to admit they do a much better job of handling product shutdowns than Google.
Microsoft tells you the dog is going to "Aunt Joy Ann's farm" and gives you a puppy.
Google blasts the dog right in front of you and leaves you to bury the poor thing.
My claim is just that they're not actually exceptional in how many products they cancel or how they cancel them. If the HN community realized that, then we'd get fewer low-quality submissions like this, and fewer low-quality comments in any Google article. That'd make HN a better place.
Which of the "products" on _this list_ was shut down badly, in comparison to what MS would do? Not products on some other list, but this list that's at the top of the front page.
Code Jam was not a product. Stadia refunded all purchases. Street View is still accessible from the Maps app, this is just removing some ancient standalone app that nobody had heard of. Currents and the wifi routers had long deprecation cycles. I bet nobody here knows anything about the wearable computing stuff or how it was shut down.
If these are all products that were reasonable to shut down, and were shut down reasonably well, then what's newsworthy about this?
People who developed for Stadia mainly did so because Google paid them outrageous amounts of money for ports, not because users they were making a lot of money buying games.
If there were no users buying games, shutting it down would not have had any meaningful impact on the developers.
How do you think they should have done it instead? What would have changed for those developers when done your way?
I'm broadly criticizing Google's ability to launch and maintain products. Launching fucked products falls under this umbrella. The point is betting on Google with your own resources is a bad idea.
Ok. When you replied to a message about whether the product shutdowns were handled well, quoted specifically the"were shut down reasonably well" text, and offered Stadia as a counter-example, I thought you were in fact claiming that Stadia was not shut down well.
My apologies, I should have realized you were not actually replying to that point in any way and just making another generic "Google cancel everything lol" argument.
Looking at the Microsoft link, the big difference seems to be age and relevance.
1. Skype for Business - 18 years old. Upgrade path to Microsoft Teams
2. Windows Server Essentials - 26 years old. Unsure how relevant this is today with everything going cloud-based
3. Atom - Wasn't originally a Microsoft product and they maintained it despite there already being a better Microsoft alternative for longer than expected. Also 9 years old
4. Internet Explorer - 27 years old and a clear upgrade path was available
5. Forza Street - F2P racing game. Can't excuse this one
6. Microsoft Academic - No excuse, however the data had an open license and migrated elsewhere
7. Channel 9 - 17 years old
8. Silverlight - 16 years old and the web had evolved beyond it long ago
Microsoft has killed 13 products since 2021 and many of them had simply run their course. Comparatively, Google has killed 57 products in that same time frame. Most of them are under 10 years old, many of them under 5. Many of them had not run their course and almost all of them had no clear upgrade or migration path.
That site really stretches the definition of killed sometimes, like "Backup and Sync" (the old desktop Google Drive client) is on there because it was renamed to "Google Drive for desktop" as part of a redesign. The only thing that was killed was the "Backup and Sync" branding, the actual functionality it provided still exists.
Google has the right to create or kill share products it wants. Consumers are not obligated to like it, refrain from complaining, or to keep adopting their products.
Isn't it person's full right to write blog posts listing said abandoned projects? Why do people get criticized for such simple observations re. the behavior of some giant company?
Carrying water for billionaires and trillion dollar companies is a common thing on HN.
So many threads are "Trillion dollar company did a shitty thing" ... "Yes, they have every right to do that, you shouldn't complain and it's your own fault since you should have known better and stop whinging on HN about it".
At least in this case, they may be Google employees.
They have a history of pulling projects that people like, and seem capricious / chaotic about it. How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example?
Other companies cancel things, but I’m not aware of any that seem to do so as often. Google started developing a reputation for this more than a decade ago and has just kept doing it if not even doing it more often!
Is it Google’s right? This is always a weird question. Sure, it’s their right. It’s also people’s right to criticize them for doing so.
I do question anybody who adopts anything from Google these days. I just have zero confidence that I can expect any new Google product or service to stick around.
> How many different chat / messaging platforms has Google put out in the last ten years, for example?
This is a good point. They don't iterate on products, at least that's my obvious perception. Instead, they launch competitor products, so in the end they end up pulling more products.
Microsoft has had various tools and programs that they sunset (lynk becoming Skype for business becoming teams) but they do try to make a migration path available (or, arguably, they just put window dressing on the same backends).
There's no migration path from Skype to Microsoft Teams (Personal). Microsoft hasn't picked one as far as I know.
Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.
I think it only seems worse from Google because their product shutdowns don't seem to be tied to financials and if that isn't the case then it makes them unpredictable to us as consumers. Let's remember that Google offers a lot of their products entirely for free. Yet the reason for shutting down Stadia was: "it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected".
But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough?
It seems wild, it initially makes no sense. Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers. I always assumed it was a bit exaggerated. But then you still have to wonder why the Stadia users can't be sold out for a profit but the Gmail users can be? Video too expensive? I guess that must be it.
>But how does that make logical sense given that Gmail is free which means it costs money to Google and yet it gets to live forever but Stadia has paying customers and it's not good enough?
>[...]
>Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers.
Yes.
Because when you can read every email and store it for data analysis focused on "targeted" ads, you can charge your customers (that's the advertisers, in case you thought it was gmail users) more when they invade your privacy.
Stadia is (or rather, was) chump change[0] at best, and it's a lot harder to spy on everything someone does online when they're just playing games. And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly.
Remember, Alphabet exists to generate profit for their shareholders -- not to make cool stuff or make their product^W users happy.
If flooding every gmail user's inbox with Goatse[1] every six minutes would increase revenue (and/or stock price), a billion people would be intimately familiar with a stranger's rectum. And GOOG would laugh all the way to the bank.
Edit: Added the missing link, fixed formatting. Added link explaining what Goatse is, for those who are too young to have had the "pleasure" of experiencing it themselves.
> And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly.
TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.
Of course having a streaming platform filled to the brim with the unending amount of cheap ad supported android game clones this would have attracted would have hardly made any sense. No need for Stadia if the games already run natively on the only supported endpoint.
>TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.
A fair point, and one I hadn't really considered.
I was thinking along the lines of multiplayer FPS games and the like. If you stop play to show some players ads, they'll be dead/have lost by the time the ad is over. If you stop play for all players to show them ads, I'd expect really high loads on servers as they "customize" the ads by region and PII.
Alternatively (as you imply), using "product placement" ads in-game without interrupting game play, I suppose that could work, no matter how disgusting it might be.
I know your question was rethorical but I'm counting 7 chat / messaging platforms :
Hangouts (2013): A messaging platform that integrated with Google+ and Gmail, offering text, voice, and video communication.
Google Messages (formerly Android Messages, 2014): An SMS, MMS, and RCS messaging application for Android devices.
Google Spaces (2016): A group messaging app that allowed users to create "spaces" for sharing links, images, and other content.
Allo (2016): A messaging app featuring AI-powered smart replies, stickers, and end-to-end encryption.
Duo (2016): A video calling app designed for one-on-one video communication on mobile devices.
Google Meet (2017): A video conferencing service that supports text chat within the meeting interface, mainly targeted at businesses and organizations.
Google Chat (formerly Hangouts Chat, 2018): A team messaging platform integrated with Google Workspace, designed for businesses and organizations.
Bonus : Google Voice had messaging capabilities, YouTube could also go in there, but that's a stretch.
Other companies kill projects when they’ve clearly failed and basically nobody is using. Google will kill things that are moderately successful and people are dependent on, but they aren’t a blockbuster success that makes a difference compared to their ad revenue.
But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
It's not about this particular list. People have been burned multiple times in the past by Google so they're going to be bitter and jump all over them whenever they cancel anything.
Maybe not "moderately successful", but if I bought a router from Google and it was no longer supported / discontinued, I would probably avoid buying a Google product again.
I think that general routers, such as TP-LINK products, become obsolete faster than Google routers because they only receive one or two firmware updates with no significant feature additions during their product cycle.
Not really, because other than things like newer standards (that'd necessitate new hardware anyway) there isn't really any changes that need to made once it works.
Stadia. Many game developers had spent months or even years of their life developing Stadia ports or exclusives and then it was cancelled without any warning.
As to whether it was successful - I mean, it didn't exist long enough to answer that question.
Other things that come to mind are Chromecast Audio and OnHub.
I don't know how successful, but I loved Inbox. The current GMail is still not close, so I'm phasing out my Google mail account.
I also enjoyed Google+ despite Google's attempts to make it worse at the end. Still miss the discussions there. A few of the communities and people moved to forums or similar, but several I've lost contact with.
A good friend of mine had built his business around the Google Earth API. He made simulators for employee training as well as games.
Another good friend still relies on Picasa, as we haven't found anything that fits his image managing needs in an equally easy way. Sure it still works, but for how long who knows.
I've seen multiple things be deprecated while at Google and I can say that the things I saw killed from the inside (because it was a product I worked on) in the past 5 years were either not being used by many users anymore or had an alternative that had similar features instead.
So if you depended on it, you could depend on something else. And if it was successful, it wasn't canceled.
I didn't work on Stadia but I imagine that it was a huge waste of money for the company for the relatively few users it had. If they could have offered a good subscription based service like Xbox Game Pass or Apple Arcade I'm sure it would have more users. But getting access to content would be very expensive. At least they refunded consumers' money for the games they purchased.
I have the same suspicion regarding Google Podcasts. The UI is stable and it doesn't seem to try very hard to promote ads or podcasts I'm not already subscribed to. I do worry that someone in Google management will realize that this product exists and decide that it's in their personal interest to either "improve" it by rearranging the entire UI until it's unusable, or just shut it down entirely.
I can only speak for myself, but in my view Google is an notoriously unreliable partner because it often pulls products and services with relatively short notice, and often with a poor path forward if at all.
Not saying Microsoft is perfect, but in my personal experience they've been a lot better in these key metrics.
If you get a rep for doing it then why would a company invest their infra into a GOOG product knowing it could get pulled at anytime? Businesses want services that are reliable and consistent. That's not GOOG.
The dedicated Streetview app was finally killed because streetview is already integrated in regular google maps. To me, that seems like a good reason to discontinue the dedicated app.
I don't get the reasoning behind this article. Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree. The article feels like blogspam riding on the hypetrain of people disliking when google discontinues products like Stadia.
Google has never been great at integrating their acquisitions. Even their own video search still can't seem to match YouTube's search for things on YouTube even with exact titles. Google Earth started as Keyhole. It's the K in KML. It gained notoriety pre-acquisition for being used in reporting on the invasion of Iraq. Maps was a different company.
You can export and import KML in Maps, but it's in a separate custom map interface under Saved->Maps. It's not integrated with the main interface like in Earth as far as I can tell. If there's a way to load them like overlays in Earth, that would be useful.
Google Earth presents the same data in a very different way - Google Maps is mostly about navigation and discovering businesses and other locations in an area, Google Earth is more about exploration and discovering cool places. Sort of like how paper maps and atlases both had reasons to exist.
Very peculiar to link to a comment that criticizes TFA as blogspam, though, right? Unless perhaps the comment wasn't so critical at time of linking and was later edited...
> Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree
What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.
Which means when a Stadia comes out, a product that could have worked if people trusted it, nobody budges. Because half the crap Google ships are “side projects which didn’t work out,” a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
They really just need clear branding between "This is a side project, we might take it away with just a months notice" and "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it".
I think they should label everything in the former category "experimental". Put the label right in the logo so it is really obvious.
Thing is... imagine they had announced "Thanks for being part of the gmail beta. We learnt a lot, but have now decided to close GMail. You have 3 days to download your emails and find a new email provider".
A lot of people would have been very pissed off, even though it said 'beta'.
As I remember, it would have been very odd for them to do that in 2008 or 2009 when it was so immensley popular. But that was 4 or 5 year into it's life, well beyond the typical lifetime of Googles products.
Them shutting it down in 2005 or 2006 would have been annoying or disappointing like the shutdown of Google Wave but understandable.
It's all about brand expectations. Google is synonymous with unreliability because they don't have another brand to shoulder that association. It used to be "Beta" but no longer.
The point is that their "release stage" marking was always fantasy land. Yes, I would be pissed if they had shut down GMail after 4 years, regardless of whether it was marked "Beta", because by that point it had a ton of users and clearly a ton of investment.
A big problem is that nobody believes their designations anyway. GMail was in beta for years when it was obviously a mature product, while "Of course we're investing a ton in Stadia..." only to shut it down a couple months later.
It’s impossible to go back in time and tell, but I bet lots of companies were opting for Microsoft Exchange/Web Outlook around 2007-2008, because Gmail was advertised as beta.
If they had removed the beta label sooner, they might have attracted businesses to GSuite sooner?
It’s a fine line to walk: you want to iterate quickly on one hand but some users need stability on the other.
When was Gmail ever sold as unlimited? When it came out the big deal was that it offered 1GB, which absolutely destroyed the 5-10MB most free providers were offering at the time.
I recall a time where they were raising the limit constantly and even advertised that fact, that for most users your available space was going to increase faster than you could use it, but there was always a limit somewhere.
No, 1GB was the starting point and was considered insane at the time. Then they eventually added a counter where the storage space grew all the time. They finally capped that out—maybe that's what you're thinking of?
They used to have “google labs” but stopped it (haha) with some stupid explanation that it wasn’t needed any more because everything is a lab, or something like that.
They did something nice, instead of leaving the users with a brick, they refunded all users who bought Stadia products through official channels.
(sadly, to get official distribution, you need to be part of the "worldwide deployment" of Google products, and it's often a lie that actually menas "we deployed in many large countries except yours")
When Gmail finally left beta after 4+ years it had well over 100m users. Some argued that the beta label slowed early adoption, while others felt that it allowed more leniency with regards to problems and downtime. I could see members of the first group have a lingering desire to avoid new products getting stuck in beta.
I honestly think that a lot of these side projects should be released under a different brand name. Kind of like how GM has different brands for their luxury cars, or Disney had Touchstone Pictures for their less-child-friendly movies. If a project is one employee's 20% time or one manager's promotion project, it should be released under a different brand name. It can always be rebranded if it becomes an actual business priority.
They could just use some google name that clearly implies it's not a "main" (long-term) product, eg. "Google Labs", "Google Beta", etc. too, so you clearly know that it's a "toy" that might not exist anymore very soon. If they use eg. "Aviato" brand for some new product, people will expect more... and then get burned.. again.
That won’t help. How is the general audience suppose to know the difference between “experimental” and “beta”?
Maybe it’s important that they act like a grown up company and have some focus instead of throwing random shit up against the wall like apes in a zoo on a crack.
> "This is a product we will give you many years notice and a migration path if we decide to get rid of it".
Is that even the standard procedure at google though? There are plenty of projects where they’ve unceremoniously pulled the plug with little notice, stadia is a glaring example (though to googles credit, they did provide some refunds)
Google Cloud “is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding” [1].
There’s a bias here for AWS because they were the early adopter product and have traction with startups.
I think Google is more creative on the business side with GCP and is doing well in the market in a lot of ways. AWS does the circa 1985 “Hi, we’re IBM, fuck you” thing.
Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals. Few of the types of people who post here understand it.
Lol. Those account managers these days get purged pretty quickly. MS isn’t Oracle, but it isn’t 2003 either.
“It would be a shame if those O365 E5 went up 30%. How about you buy 50% of your spend on these credits that fell off the truck, and we can forget about that?”
Presumably because the article linked above says that the rumoured deadline for gaining sufficient market share is this year? Also, yes revenues have been growing, but is GCP profitable after all this time? As you point out, it's been 4 years since that article was published.
Because Google no longer knows how to do customer/developer engagement just as it goes into things that require it more?
It doesn't help that it allows others to push opinion pieces in media that build up memes against its products (I honestly believe it's non-trivial part of what killed Google+ - at some point someone believed at Google about it being "ghost town" and started making it more FB-like and pushing "new people to observe" at you, making it less and less usable).
The infamous "will kill your account on basis of unaccountable algorithm and you can't do anything about it" is another big issue when trying to get clients on GCP. I honestly find GCP to be the best cloud I can use when not going full hog on things like AWS-specific services, yet there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.
Right up to the point where Google top management decides to pull the plug. Their messaging on this has been most unfortunate, if there is one thing that you can't do as a cloud services provider it is to threaten to pull the plug on the whole division if the numbers don't get into some arbitrary range for their definition of success. That pretty much guarantees that you won't make it that far.
Google really messed up their roll outs of new products so often that it is almost a meme.
You'd be hard pressed to pick a 'worst', between Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave and so on the list is long and getting longer all the time. It would be a lot smarter if they launched these separately so that they do not impact the trust relationship people have with their main brand. I don't know any other company besides Yahoo that has managed this in such a terrible way.
That might have been Google Buzz? Which automatically followed people it thought you knew. Like automatically linking someone to an abusive spouse they'd run from, and exposing all their chats to them.
Ironically, it's now actually called "Google Chat". I still use it with plenty of people since it allows me to chat via browser, iOS, or Android without any device/brand restrictions.
But in just about every way, it is the same or worse than their previous offerings (the older "Talk" and the later "Hangouts"). They ditched the option to do SMS fallback in the same app instead of improving on integration. Can't just hit the little camera icon in a group chat to instantly start a group video call anymore. Individual and group chats are in separate tabs. Photo and video handling are worse (but at least not downgraded as badly as MMS between Android and iOS).
Honestly I only use it because it sucks to message with iOS users if you can't use iMessage and I/some of my friends don't use Facebook products like FB or Whatsapp.
> What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.
So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new, and on the other hand Google can't just get things out and experiment because it would let down people who bet on these experiments.
There is probably an in-between.
> a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
Two years ago Google Cloud was 37k employees[1], which is about 20% of the company. Even if the 12k layoffs were on Cloud that would still be 10-12% of the company.
Calling it a side project and comparing it to a "smart tag embedded in clothing" or even Stadia is just FUD.
wasn't there an HN thread a couple years ago where Google announced Cloud had a couple years to make money (but without specifying what would happen if it didn't) and now here we are? I'm worried I'm forgetting exactly the dates here since I never keep track of Google Cloud, but I remember a bunch of people announcing they weren't going to use Google cloud because obviously it would be shut down in a few years?
No. That link is not Google announcing what you claim they did. It's some anonymous person - not Google - claiming they saw some confidential slides to that effect, which Google then denied.
From what I can remember, this is a rumor, not something Google "announced".
From the beginning of the article:
> The Google unit, (...) is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
I'm sure that there are discussions about the strategy, the expected growth and revenue and what to do if these targets aren't met. It totally makes sense to reduce the rate of investments to mitigate risks if the results aren't what was expected, but this doesn't mean "shutting down" Cloud.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely,
Seriously, Google could even decide to leave the Cloud business eventually, branching it off the rest of the company. But "shutting it down" wouldn't suddenly happen because a spreadsheet shows that Azure has more market shares than Google.
> So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new
From everything I've read here, the problem is that only innovation is rewarded with promotions. Once a product is released, the people in charge get promoted, and move on to another new project, leaving everything to die.
It's something I've heard and read many times, inside and outside of the company, but it's something I haven't really witnessed in my 4 years here.
There are many ways to be promoted and launching something new is definitely not the easiest way.
I understand that it's common to see people leave a team or product once they shipped a promo project, but products don't just die because one or two senior people leave a team.
I think that's the whole point though. A lot of the products, if they can even be called that, listed in this article are not even possible to "bet on". I mean, Code Jam?? I think it sucks they shut it down, but annual events and conferences come and go, it's not like people had a right to expect it would go on indefinitely.
I only think about half the items in this list are even possible to invest much time on as an outsider, either a customer or a partner: Stadia (obviously a ton has already been written about that), OnHub (classic "I bought an IoT device that isn't much better than a paperweight after they stopped support), and Google Currents (though that one is marginal - I don't know anyone who used it, also I don't know how seamless the transition to Spaces was).
I think the biggest issue with Google products is that nobody trusts them because they won't stand by any roadmaps. If they had clear, discrete classes of products that they actually stood behind (e.g. "these we'll only guarantee to support for the next 18 months" vs. "these are mature products we stand by"), I think folks would be more OK going into things with eyes wide open. But Google has time and again bullshitted ("Of course we're investing in Stadia..."), or even had things been in beta for years and years when they were obviously mature products, like GMail. And since it's clear Google only really cares about ad revenue, when shit hits the fan and they need to "streamline", like now, anything that doesn't directly support ads like Search, Android, GMail, Chrome, etc. feels like an afterthought.
I mostly used the Street View app to capture 360° spherical panoramas, offline, on-device.
Now that Google has killed the app, I can’t capture those photos! The app worked fine a month ago, why not let me use it, as it worked offline‽
No one seems to be talking about this issue.
I haven’t found suitable replacement apps to capture photospheres on a (i)Phone. The suggested Street View Studio doesn’t let you capture Photo Spheres!
This is kind of your answer right? It’s not the issue to others that it is to you. If Google sunsetted Search, for example, I think people would talk about that issue.
I'd love to know your breakdown of which 3 are "side projects." the 2 I can imagine you are referring to, jacquard and onhub, had 3rd party hardware manufacturers implementing them.
These are all projects that google wanted developers to engage with their ecosystem. Routinely inviting devs over to work with you, then kicking them out in the cold, will obviously have consequences.
I remember participating in CodeJam 2003 twenty years ago, and it was such a positive experience that Google was the first company I applied to out of college.
Right now I'm working on a project using a gcp API, and now I'm considering finding an alternative because arbitrarily doing the same work twice is never the most efficient way.
Stadia is a big deal. And OnHub must really suck if you have it as your router.
I think it’s probably 90% blogspam and reinforces that anyone sane should very carefully evaluate whether they rely on anything google releases.
Personally, I’ve looked at google phones and networking and home stuff and won’t touch it with a ten foot pole because I don’t want to switch out my router because google decides to kill it.
I agree on the side projects or conferences being shut down and thought the same thing of “why is this even a stand alone app, wouldn’t people just use maps?”
Beyond the serious dependability questions Google raises, I feel bad for the millions of units of OnHub, Nest, Stadia, and other hardware that are still perfectly functional, but rendered obsolete because of what amounts to high level, corporate financial decisions.
Any company engaging in mass market IoT sales should be compelled, for the sake of consumer confidence and protection, of an "exit plan" to allow fully localized control of these devices -- independent of an upstream server or system.
Sad because they had the best technology and UX of any game streaming service out there. But also the least business acumen, marketing skills, and perseverance.
These decisions look rational. Not capricious. Stuff that isn't reaching a sustainable audience at Google scale, and that can't be spun-off, like Niantic, for example, should get cut.
370 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadFuchsia is maybe 1/4 product and the rest is a long term infrastructure investment. If Google had lost interest they’d have no problem shutting it down by now, for instance stadia rose and fell in a shorter time span than all of fuchsia.
I don’t know whether fuchsia will “make it”, heck a frustrated enough SvP can probably kill it if they really wanted to. However, fuchsia never lived in the same world as the rest of Google, or even the platform & ecosystems org (Android & ChromeOS), not really.
Nobody ever expected a new OS and kernel to be a mainstream success in single digit years. It’s an insane project to take on, and ironically that insanity keeps a lot of the short term opportunists away, specifically the kind that leaves a crater after them when they leave..
It does feel like they’ve lost a lot of interest in Android. It’s too big for Google to just close, but I could see them selling it. If that happens, hopefully it’s to a Microsoft but chances are they will screw us all and sell it to Oracle or Xiaomi.
But there are a lot of things that will die before Android or Fuschia. Here’s a list of 270 Google projects (past and present)[1]. I learned about Google Sunroof through this list (rooftop solar calculator) and it’s pretty neat.
[1]: https://maheshone.com/google-products-and-services/
IMO they are aiming to replace Android with Fuchsia. Because they have full control of Fuchsia, and so-so control of Android. They don't need to sell Android. They can just let it die on its own in AOSP which is already nonviable without Google's services.
as long as it's not Microsoft itself of course.
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36949085
Stadia Onhub Glass
otherwise you can be pwned by a phone call
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-inte...
phones from mid 2022 seem like abandonware already
> require you to turn off your mobile data yet
Wifi calling and VoLTE is not mobile data.
> phones from mid 2022 seem like abandonware already
Samsung supports updates for multiple years. Mid 2022 gets you previous samsung model - S22, where S23 was released this year 2023.
for some reason Android allows carriers to hide the VoLTE and Wifi calling toggles in the UI
meaning the only fix is to turn cellular connectivity off completely
https://source.android.com/docs/security/bulletin/pixel/2023...
out of 18 or so
you can see on the linked page on google's own bugtracker that they're still unfixed
I bought a Pixel 6, I don't think I'll buy another Pixel again.
The official pixel case got destroyed due to wear in not even a year (my own 3D printed case in TPU now lasted longer than google one). The official pixel case also caught some dust and scratched the glass of the back.
The pixel without a case is so slippery it slip alone on any surface not perfectly flat.
welcome to the "official case" club. all my iphone cases get destroyed in max 6 months, with one lasting less than 3 months. during the course of an iphone (2 years) i go thru 5-6 "official" cases.
And Google's approach to Pixels reflects that: they make them greta, then they all but abandon them, then okay again, then...
for instance the most profitable watch companies in the world are Timex, Rolex and Omega, and they have a combined market share of a fraction of a percent and on a per-unit basis they don't sell, combined, a thousandth of the units Casio alone sells (by the way most smartwatches are sell at nearly no profit and Apple's watch business has been losing money for a while)
Compare it to high end products then, and you'd still come up short.
There's also the reason why I pointed out "in the context of Google, and Google products": it's a tiny product made at great effort and expense that Google clearly doesn't know what to do about (they haven't even supported their own phones for more than three years until recently).
companies don't get to #3 or #4 in some of the most lucrative sectors in the world and then just decide to close shop because they're not #1 or #2
there are a bunch of profitable companies that ONLY make money in Pixel's sector, are recognised brands and they are already behind the Pixel in market share
it's essentially like being Rolex in the watch business (number 1 or 2 in profit depending on market) and just closing shop because Casio sells 1000x+ more watches
almost every major brand has essentially their flagship and most do worse than the Pixel
Asus, Xiaomi, Huawei, Sony, Vivo, Oppo, Motorola, OnePlus, etc etc all have high-end phones
only Apple and Samsung are doing better than Google Pixel
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/21/consumers-are-splurging-on...
"While both Honor and Google’s share of the premium smartphone segment more than doubled in 2022 from 2021, they still only account for around 1% of the pie, so they are still significantly smaller players."
Behind Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi.
To put it in perspective: Pixel was launched 6 years ago which replaced Google Nexus, launched 13 years ago. It's a very minor product that Google has been pouring money into with little to no effect.
since Google killed Stadia and perhaps has no chance at the console business, it strategically looks like a terrible idea to exit the mobile hardware division, but again, with Google you never know
the image Google has created around having essentially no commitment to any business lines makes it hard for them to enter the console market with longer cycles, but doesn't hurt them as much in the mobile market as phones are replaced often anyway
PS: Pixel is just Google's newer mobile hardware brand, for me there is no real difference with Nexus in that respect - just a rebranding
Define: High end
Define: "some markets"
Also: Pixel isn't one phone. It's Pixel 7 Pro (premium) and Pixel 7 (sorta medium) and Pixel 6a (cheap)
Also: We're talking about Google, 80% of whose revenue comes from online advertisement. Spending a lot of effort on a relatively low-volume hardware product that may be some number in some markets is not nearly enough to guarantee long-term viability of the product. I'm surprised Google has stuck by Pixel (given the very spotted history of the phone) at all.
It’s interesting to me that they continue to spawn and nix products like this despite the reputation damage it causes.
Anyone wanna bet on if/when Bard gets axed?
Everything I've heard (mostly on HN) about working there is that there are simply too many perverse incentives to abandon products. People get promoted for creating exciting new products and then leave those products behind at their new position.
Up-and-comers are also incentivized to do the same thing. There seems to be no appetite whatsoever for hiring "steady hand on the tiller" type people. The whole company DNA is built around hiring elite graduates fresh out of school.
It's the classic "too many chefs in the kitchen" problem.
Anyone from Google want to check my post history and reach out to someone able and willing to do boring maintenance?
Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.
The basic issue, it seems, is that the higher-ups simply don’t care about the products themselves, other than for them to serve as a profit center.
The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.
And guess who is high on the list if cuts are to be made?
There are thousands of companies that manage to maintain much more boring apps with salaries much lower than Google's.
The promo system has changed in the last year. So to some extent this info is outdated.
And while obviously culture and incentives play a role I think the statement that this is the major reason for Google killing products is largely false.
New grads aren't making any big decisions about products.
And Google has many steady seniors because of the high tenure rate. In fact the one of the major complaints is that it is too steady , too bureaucratic and too slow.
The OP we're all discussing is about six products Google cancelled in 2023! If Google has decided to change course on this issue then their efforts have yet to bear fruit. The ball is completely in their court. We're all sitting here waiting to see when Google will decide to place some emphasis on trust and long-term stewardship.
Of course, you can't build a reputation for those things overnight, so it will take a while. But there is no sign whatsoever that they have actually changed course.
Yes, but we're not the people making the product decisions.
Stadia's shutdown was inevitable in part because we had already established this distrust, and also because leadership handled every aspect of it incredibly poorly. It was technically impressive, but the economics relied on the addressable market actually being willing to go all-in on the service.
Sure, you can blame part of it on the promo culture encouraging people to move to new and shiny projects, and part of it on the fact that we release a lot more experimental stuff than you see at more established companies, but there's also plenty of cases where there was exactly one person who understood the codebase and was keeping the product running, and said person is no longer at the company for one reason or another.
In my opinion, Bard should never have been released in its current state, but, that's leadership for you.
Google Assistant still feels so stunted and lifeless when I know Google can produce more realistic generated speech audio, interpret requests in plain English and respond in a helpful manner.
It wasn't until Alexa and Siri gained traction that they let "Hey google" slip in.
This is what I don’t understand. Is leadership really this dumb or are we missing large pieces of context?
The prevailing sentiment is google is flakey. Don’t rely on their stuff.
Now removing redundant services is one thing. But from the outside it looks like they don’t care about regaining confidence. And they don’t care about creating new stable products that I want.
Did they really think Stadia would be an instant success with their shit reputation in a market that has been already carved up by the incumbents? A naïve observer would say it would take years and a ton of money.
No subscription can compete with just owning the games and the hardware.
The marketing was... not executed well. Most people didn't realize that you could actually just buy games on the platform and play them without paying the monthly subscription for Pro. The backbone of the business model was supposed to be driven by that 30% cut of game sales revenue that most gaming platforms / stores take.
The infrastructure was supposed to be further subsidized by selling off-peak compute as a cloud service. That never materialized.
The exclusives were lackluster compared to other platforms (Breath of the Wild? Halo Infinite? God of War Ragnarok?), and leadership shuttered the in-house game studios before they were able to release much of anything.
Beyond all that -- there were plenty of features that owning your own hardware simply could not compete with. Just to list a few:
- Not having to wait for video game downloads was an incredibly underrated feature -- being able to start playing a game within seconds meant you could play a game immediately after an impulse purchase, rather than having to wait half an hour (100GB download at 500Mbps) first.
- Family sharing meant that you could play Cyberpunk 2077 (which, by the way, launched with serious performance issues across most platforms... but played smoothly on Stadia), while the kids next to you on the couch played, I dunno, Paw Patrol, all on hardware you already owned, e.g. your laptop, or phone, or the Chromecast that came with the founder's edition (also 100% optional).
- You could seamlessly continue a game across multiple devices -- play a game at home on your TV, then continue at a friend's house on your phone.
I think the 'problem' is that reputation damage doesn't really impact Google's revenue. They get the overwhelming majority of their money from publishing adverts, with a significant amount on their own properties (search and YouTube). It really doesn't matter if a bunch of gamers decide Stadia screwed them over, or if some devs decide to avoid GCP because they killed Reader. Google still makes a staggering amount of money no matter what.
The only way Google killing products will ever impact the company is either if people have an alternative to Google Search (very unlikely) or if people stop wanting to work for Google because they see it as a dead end working on things that only last a few years (also unlikely because $$$ talks).
Google will continue to launch, run, and then kill products forever. I suspect that if you're at Google and you're not working on ads or something that displays ads then you're being paid to build something frivolous that won't go anywhere mainly so you don't go and work at a different company that could impact one of Google's cash cows. I'm a bit envious if I'm honest. That sounds fun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28224730
Googles results got stagnant and Google overall was complacent. ChatGPT is capitalising on this.
Google: good search results mean the user clicks on an ad this time but the results look plausible enough they’ll come back for their next search.
I don't even buy the idea that "exponential growth" will improve things. One of the few things OpenAI is still open about is that they will keep adding more parameters at any cost. Techniques to reinforce truthful responses or even provide confidence based on whether the response involves out-of-sample & out-of-prompt guessing (i.e. BSing) seem not to be a priority.
At some point you have to look at trends more than philosophical speculation.
But I don’t believe that either. Hardware design and manufacturing cycles are long and we’re just now starting to see transformer-optimized HW. Accuracy per dollar and per joule will improve by at least an order of magnitude, maybe two.
But then we can move on to percent of human tasks LLMs are suitable replacements for, or the ethics of increasing automation.
[0]https://openai.com/pricing
[1]https://www.wired.com/story/cerebras-chip-cluster-neural-net...
Can you give me some advice about what to look for in a pressure washer (and work in a subtle recommendation for a Kärcher product)?
I think Tiktok is more of a risk to Facebook/Instagram, yet Meta is still doing just fine.
I started using Bing ~2 years ago. At the start, I used Google to get alternate results for about 1/4 of searches. Today? I drop to Google a couple of times a month, at most, usually when searching for something very ambiguous. I don't even live in the US.
But it's not a unique problem. I think their peers in the giant mature technology company business tend to take fewer shots and put more investment in the ones they do take.
But they also still kill products eventually. I can't load music on the iPod shuffle I still have in a drawer. My windows 95 disks aren't very useful. The Amazon store I did Christmas shopping at a couple years ago is some kind of boutique clothing store now.
But I do think Google's decisions always seem to feel more sudden, that once they give up on a product, they pull the band-aid off way more quickly. And I do think they seem to take more shots that don't work out.
Yeah, about like this: https://killedbygoogle.com/
I don't really care if Google is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in supporting anything that isn't G-Suite, search, or ads. Their track record is more than enough for me to dismiss using Google Cloud Platform, or even saving anything of any importance to Google Drive. I'm occasionally involved some of those types of vendor decisions, and I imagine others in similar positions feel the same way, so I can't imagine this is all theoretical fake losses they've suffered from this MO. I don't know how you'd even begin to measure the amount of revenue opportunities lost in this way, but I will say this: I'm really glad I'm not a part of Google's marketing department.
No idea how it somehow kinda works and when it’ll finally explode in my face.
Everyone else: do NOT use Google as your registrar. Just don't.
I think it's some combo of an organizational/internal-incentives failure, and a cultural thing where all these "geniuses" they hire can't be bothered to do any boring shit, to include, sometimes, properly finishing features they start developing.
Yeah, outside of tech enthusiasts, the majority of people don’t care.
Street view was an app for marketing. In 2010 it looked really cool and helped their image.
None of these projects/products looked financially feasible. And a code jam? Jesus Christ, my public library hosts code meetups.
This blog post is boring and weird. It comes off as a weak attempt to find more reasons to hate Google.
I guess this means a "reputation" doesn't influence their profits. Some companies aren't in impression-making business, or even pretending-to-be-trying-to-make-their-customers-happy business.
Google might have made more inroads with enterprises with G suite and GCP if they didn't have that reputation. The gaming industry is a 200 billion/year market that Google could've captured a decent size of if potential customers trusted that they wouldn't quickly give up. All of that represents billions of dollars in lost opportunities.
Surely the people on Hackrnews understand that no one outside of tech enthusiasts even knows about this, right? I have to imagine so... they're smart people and surely sometimes interact with regular people in real life?!
But on a more serious note: none of these projects have ever had any traction. That's why they're killed!
Try asking anyone who's not in tech but does play videogames what Stadia is. You'll soon find out why it's axed.
It starts with a loss of cultural cachet among the people who influence spending. It looks like hip startups with rows of desks with Apple machines where Windows was the default for a decade or two before.
I don’t think Google can innovate anymore. They did a lot of great work as a startup and when they were much smaller (<10k headcount). Now most of what they do fails.
It seems like an interesting concept, since hands-free control of your phone via speech is often too awkward to use in public imho.
Maybe it'll come back when the hardware is able to shrink even more, making it less conspicuous.
"This person said the group’s leaders didn’t explicitly state what would happen to the cloud division if it didn’t reach a top two position by 2023. A commonly held view inside the group was that Google wouldn’t continue investing money if it failed to it meet its goal, the person said. "
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
I almost want GCP to fail just for the popcorn factor.
No, but you could "Google Group" it. Just keep the lights on and not develop it any further and just watch customers leave over time. There might actually be a bunch of corporate customers that would view the static environment as a plus.
I don't really see them shutting down GCP, even if it's a bit anonymous. It is interesting that Google can't turn a profit on GCP, given that both AWS and Azure is doing to well.
What seems more likely is that they shut down an increasing number of individual sub-products, in the way that they are shuttering IoT Core [2]. If they do, then I'm not convinced that will be a bad thing -- a slimmed down, profitable, platform with a well-supported set of core services feels like a safe long-term partner.
[1] https://www.ciodive.com/news/Google-Cloud-Profitability-Alph...
[2] https://cloud.google.com/iot-core
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27039202
Google Code Jam was not a product, and it was an event that was a net loss in terms of revenue, which is hard to justify maintaining when you are cutting thousands of jobs.
Google Street View is part of Google Maps, the post even says so.
Google OnHub is a one time hardware product. Nobody is blaming Nintendo for killing the Gameboy Color when it stopped producing it.
I don't see how any of the 6 things mentioned here have been unjustifiably "killed".
Arguing "it's hardware" doesn't work when the features are cloud-based and the company shuts down the servers. It's bait and switch, pure and simple.
You just have the wrong expectation for online products.
I bought a router. I never expect any router to stop working because the manufacturer flips a switch.
You bought a connected router. Again, you just have the wrong expectation for online products. The fact that it was maintained for 8 years should be praised.
At some point you have to have an ounce of common sense.
As a consumer, especially a tech savvy one we should continue to push tech companies to build products that last and serve the user and not just throw our hands up and say “we have the wrong expectations”
Sadly, that sentiment doesn't seem to be popular these days.
> Then in January 2023, the company rendered the product almost completely useless by disabling most of its features.
I think GameBoy Color still works today?
Also, the list is missing Nest Secure.
There's a bright distinction between natural wear of the product and remote shutdowns.
Analogy: I don't get outraged if my laptop's battery loses capacity or even swells over time. I do get outraged if I can't boot my laptop because it checked with some remote server that decided I'm not allowed to boot it.
[1] https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/11257354?hl=en
Did your Gameboy Color stop working when Nintendo decided to stop producing it?
8 years of support for their router doesn't seem bad at all.
Nintendo should definitely have been required to make the battery accessible.
Legislation should be put in place so that features not requiring a connection shall work offline.
In north America, there is a lot of political pressure for some environmental issues but nothing about planned obsolescence.
I'm afraid that in most cases that is just impossible, because the service is essentially all in the "cloud" by design.
Perhaps the company should be forced to sustain service for a minimum warranty period like in the EU with their 2-years minimum legislation, which has cost repercussions onto the user.
But really in most cases the problem is that it's so accepted to be sucked into subscription deals where the company can change their end of the deal at a moment's notice, and where you might just lose a lot of invested time and effort, let alone data and privacy, and essentially nothing of that can be properly compensated.
So it comes back to the question that ed_mercer had: why is there such a double standard? Why does somebody obsessively maintain that site, and why does a large part of the HN audience love spamming "when will Google cancel search lol" into any discussion about Google, when Amazon putting two bullets into the neck of yet another product goes unnoticed?
Microsoft is religious about maintaining backward compatibility and support. They also have some concept of service, which makes cancellations smoother. (All this makes product development aware of the costs of abandonment. Google doesn’t have that in its culture, and it’s a constant problem with hiring from them now.)
Microsoft tells you the dog is going to "Aunt Joy Ann's farm" and gives you a puppy.
Google blasts the dog right in front of you and leaves you to bury the poor thing.
Which of the "products" on _this list_ was shut down badly, in comparison to what MS would do? Not products on some other list, but this list that's at the top of the front page.
Code Jam was not a product. Stadia refunded all purchases. Street View is still accessible from the Maps app, this is just removing some ancient standalone app that nobody had heard of. Currents and the wifi routers had long deprecation cycles. I bet nobody here knows anything about the wearable computing stuff or how it was shut down.
If these are all products that were reasonable to shut down, and were shut down reasonably well, then what's newsworthy about this?
Nobody who developed for Stadia thinks this. And this is far from a HN view—it regularly comes up at conferences for financial types.
If there were no users buying games, shutting it down would not have had any meaningful impact on the developers.
How do you think they should have done it instead? What would have changed for those developers when done your way?
Launched it as a start-up with unfair access to Google's resources. There was no way for it to work under Google's aegis.
Obviously it was not a well launched product, but that's what you get when you hire Phil Harrison.
I'm broadly criticizing Google's ability to launch and maintain products. Launching fucked products falls under this umbrella. The point is betting on Google with your own resources is a bad idea.
My apologies, I should have realized you were not actually replying to that point in any way and just making another generic "Google cancel everything lol" argument.
But if you search for "killed by Amazon", you get back news articles about people actually dying in its warehouses.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-wa...
1. Skype for Business - 18 years old. Upgrade path to Microsoft Teams
2. Windows Server Essentials - 26 years old. Unsure how relevant this is today with everything going cloud-based
3. Atom - Wasn't originally a Microsoft product and they maintained it despite there already being a better Microsoft alternative for longer than expected. Also 9 years old 4. Internet Explorer - 27 years old and a clear upgrade path was available
5. Forza Street - F2P racing game. Can't excuse this one
6. Microsoft Academic - No excuse, however the data had an open license and migrated elsewhere
7. Channel 9 - 17 years old
8. Silverlight - 16 years old and the web had evolved beyond it long ago
Microsoft has killed 13 products since 2021 and many of them had simply run their course. Comparatively, Google has killed 57 products in that same time frame. Most of them are under 10 years old, many of them under 5. Many of them had not run their course and almost all of them had no clear upgrade or migration path.
https://gcemetery.co/
https://killedbymozilla.com/
So many threads are "Trillion dollar company did a shitty thing" ... "Yes, they have every right to do that, you shouldn't complain and it's your own fault since you should have known better and stop whinging on HN about it".
At least in this case, they may be Google employees.
Oh, wait, you already mentioned Google employees. My bad.
Other companies cancel things, but I’m not aware of any that seem to do so as often. Google started developing a reputation for this more than a decade ago and has just kept doing it if not even doing it more often!
Is it Google’s right? This is always a weird question. Sure, it’s their right. It’s also people’s right to criticize them for doing so.
I do question anybody who adopts anything from Google these days. I just have zero confidence that I can expect any new Google product or service to stick around.
This is a good point. They don't iterate on products, at least that's my obvious perception. Instead, they launch competitor products, so in the end they end up pulling more products.
Microsoft similarly has a bunch of duplicate services and products. They've got chat functionality spread across many apps, specifically Teams, Skype, and Xbox. Windows also has widgets in Windows 11 and widgets in Xbox Game Bar. There's also the mess that is developing apps for Windows that has just become Chromium, partially due to Microsoft's own messes.
>[...]
>Unless I'm being more than naive and we the users are quite LITERALLY sold out to advertisers.
Yes.
Because when you can read every email and store it for data analysis focused on "targeted" ads, you can charge your customers (that's the advertisers, in case you thought it was gmail users) more when they invade your privacy.
Stadia is (or rather, was) chump change[0] at best, and it's a lot harder to spy on everything someone does online when they're just playing games. And pausing game play to show you ads...well, that would certainly never fly.
Remember, Alphabet exists to generate profit for their shareholders -- not to make cool stuff or make their product^W users happy.
If flooding every gmail user's inbox with Goatse[1] every six minutes would increase revenue (and/or stock price), a billion people would be intimately familiar with a stranger's rectum. And GOOG would laugh all the way to the bank.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chump%20change
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goatse.cx
Edit: Added the missing link, fixed formatting. Added link explaining what Goatse is, for those who are too young to have had the "pleasure" of experiencing it themselves.
TV has been doing popup ads for years and I am quite sure many Android games also do it. Then you have ads that could be directly embedded into the game play or the games environment itself, a port to Stadia was necessary anyway, so adding ad support could have been done as part of that.
Of course having a streaming platform filled to the brim with the unending amount of cheap ad supported android game clones this would have attracted would have hardly made any sense. No need for Stadia if the games already run natively on the only supported endpoint.
A fair point, and one I hadn't really considered.
I was thinking along the lines of multiplayer FPS games and the like. If you stop play to show some players ads, they'll be dead/have lost by the time the ad is over. If you stop play for all players to show them ads, I'd expect really high loads on servers as they "customize" the ads by region and PII.
Alternatively (as you imply), using "product placement" ads in-game without interrupting game play, I suppose that could work, no matter how disgusting it might be.
Hangouts (2013): A messaging platform that integrated with Google+ and Gmail, offering text, voice, and video communication.
Google Messages (formerly Android Messages, 2014): An SMS, MMS, and RCS messaging application for Android devices.
Google Spaces (2016): A group messaging app that allowed users to create "spaces" for sharing links, images, and other content.
Allo (2016): A messaging app featuring AI-powered smart replies, stickers, and end-to-end encryption.
Duo (2016): A video calling app designed for one-on-one video communication on mobile devices.
Google Meet (2017): A video conferencing service that supports text chat within the meeting interface, mainly targeted at businesses and organizations.
Google Chat (formerly Hangouts Chat, 2018): A team messaging platform integrated with Google Workspace, designed for businesses and organizations.
Bonus : Google Voice had messaging capabilities, YouTube could also go in there, but that's a stretch.
But mostly we’ve just never forgiven them for killing Google Reader. And we never will.
As to whether it was successful - I mean, it didn't exist long enough to answer that question.
Other things that come to mind are Chromecast Audio and OnHub.
The list is much much longer, I'm surprised you're having a hard time finding them.
I also enjoyed Google+ despite Google's attempts to make it worse at the end. Still miss the discussions there. A few of the communities and people moved to forums or similar, but several I've lost contact with.
A good friend of mine had built his business around the Google Earth API. He made simulators for employee training as well as games.
Another good friend still relies on Picasa, as we haven't found anything that fits his image managing needs in an equally easy way. Sure it still works, but for how long who knows.
So if you depended on it, you could depend on something else. And if it was successful, it wasn't canceled.
I didn't work on Stadia but I imagine that it was a huge waste of money for the company for the relatively few users it had. If they could have offered a good subscription based service like Xbox Game Pass or Apple Arcade I'm sure it would have more users. But getting access to content would be very expensive. At least they refunded consumers' money for the games they purchased.
Not saying Microsoft is perfect, but in my personal experience they've been a lot better in these key metrics.
I don't get the reasoning behind this article. Half of this list is side projects which didn't work out, which is understandable to a certain degree. The article feels like blogspam riding on the hypetrain of people disliking when google discontinues products like Stadia.
You can export and import KML in Maps, but it's in a separate custom map interface under Saved->Maps. It's not integrated with the main interface like in Earth as far as I can tell. If there's a way to load them like overlays in Earth, that would be useful.
Perhaps the poster is the author of article, and possibly the user gondaloof (they are both green accounts).
Or maybe the author of the article is just paying attention to HN.
You can feel fulfilled as an HN user. Your comment was cited (linked) in the article.
Note: I am not an author of the article :)
What happens to the people who bet on them? Do they even have a point of contact if e.g. an integration breaks? That’s the point. They’re half-baked products being put out and pulled with no care in the world. That’s the brand.
Which means when a Stadia comes out, a product that could have worked if people trusted it, nobody budges. Because half the crap Google ships are “side projects which didn’t work out,” a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
I think they should label everything in the former category "experimental". Put the label right in the logo so it is really obvious.
A lot of people would have been very pissed off, even though it said 'beta'.
Them shutting it down in 2005 or 2006 would have been annoying or disappointing like the shutdown of Google Wave but understandable.
It's all about brand expectations. Google is synonymous with unreliability because they don't have another brand to shoulder that association. It used to be "Beta" but no longer.
A big problem is that nobody believes their designations anyway. GMail was in beta for years when it was obviously a mature product, while "Of course we're investing a ton in Stadia..." only to shut it down a couple months later.
Sure, go ahead. But the market will take notice if you do that.
If they had removed the beta label sooner, they might have attracted businesses to GSuite sooner?
It’s a fine line to walk: you want to iterate quickly on one hand but some users need stability on the other.
I recall a time where they were raising the limit constantly and even advertised that fact, that for most users your available space was going to increase faster than you could use it, but there was always a limit somewhere.
And of course gmail was in beta for many years.
Lying to consumers is the safer (short term) bet.
(sadly, to get official distribution, you need to be part of the "worldwide deployment" of Google products, and it's often a lie that actually menas "we deployed in many large countries except yours")
Maybe it’s important that they act like a grown up company and have some focus instead of throwing random shit up against the wall like apes in a zoo on a crack.
https://tables.area120.google.com/u/0/about
Is that even the standard procedure at google though? There are plenty of projects where they’ve unceremoniously pulled the plug with little notice, stadia is a glaring example (though to googles credit, they did provide some refunds)
That's a bit of a bummer, but probably fine. Just one of those things about working at a grown up company rather than a scrappy upstart.
What do you mean by this? It seems GCP has around 10pc market share and growing.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
I think Google is more creative on the business side with GCP and is doing well in the market in a lot of ways. AWS does the circa 1985 “Hi, we’re IBM, fuck you” thing.
Azure doesn’t get the grief GCP does because MS service growth is driven by really complicated deals. Few of the types of people who post here understand it.
The kind crafted by competent sales teams in it for the long haul. Not the rotating cast of characters at Google.
“It would be a shame if those O365 E5 went up 30%. How about you buy 50% of your spend on these credits that fell off the truck, and we can forget about that?”
It doesn't help that it allows others to push opinion pieces in media that build up memes against its products (I honestly believe it's non-trivial part of what killed Google+ - at some point someone believed at Google about it being "ghost town" and started making it more FB-like and pushing "new people to observe" at you, making it less and less usable).
The infamous "will kill your account on basis of unaccountable algorithm and you can't do anything about it" is another big issue when trying to get clients on GCP. I honestly find GCP to be the best cloud I can use when not going full hog on things like AWS-specific services, yet there's always the fear that Google will just kill the account, possibly shuttering the business.
I get that feeling sometimes about my Gmail account.
If I do get deleted by the algorithm, then I feel the only way I will get support is by posting it on hackernews.
Keep doing that long enough, and still be behind AWS by 4x, and you’ll get your plug pulled.
You'd be hard pressed to pick a 'worst', between Google Glass, Google Plus, Google Wave and so on the list is long and getting longer all the time. It would be a lot smarter if they launched these separately so that they do not impact the trust relationship people have with their main brand. I don't know any other company besides Yahoo that has managed this in such a terrible way.
It became a meme a long time ago.
But in just about every way, it is the same or worse than their previous offerings (the older "Talk" and the later "Hangouts"). They ditched the option to do SMS fallback in the same app instead of improving on integration. Can't just hit the little camera icon in a group chat to instantly start a group video call anymore. Individual and group chats are in separate tabs. Photo and video handling are worse (but at least not downgraded as badly as MMS between Android and iOS).
Honestly I only use it because it sucks to message with iOS users if you can't use iMessage and I/some of my friends don't use Facebook products like FB or Whatsapp.
So on one hand Google doesn't innovate anymore and is too shy to release anything new, and on the other hand Google can't just get things out and experiment because it would let down people who bet on these experiments.
There is probably an in-between.
> a list which apparently now includes its cloud.
Two years ago Google Cloud was 37k employees[1], which is about 20% of the company. Even if the 12k layoffs were on Cloud that would still be 10-12% of the company.
Calling it a side project and comparing it to a "smart tag embedded in clothing" or even Stadia is just FUD.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-26/google-fa...
on edit: someone else down thread has a link to it https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
From the beginning of the article:
> The Google unit, (...) is under pressure from top management to pass Amazon or Microsoft—currently first and second, respectively, in cloud market share—or risk losing funding.
I'm sure that there are discussions about the strategy, the expected growth and revenue and what to do if these targets aren't met. It totally makes sense to reduce the rate of investments to mitigate risks if the results aren't what was expected, but this doesn't mean "shutting down" Cloud.
From the article:
> The group even talked about—and eventually dismissed—the idea of leaving the market entirely,
Seriously, Google could even decide to leave the Cloud business eventually, branching it off the rest of the company. But "shutting it down" wouldn't suddenly happen because a spreadsheet shows that Azure has more market shares than Google.
From everything I've read here, the problem is that only innovation is rewarded with promotions. Once a product is released, the people in charge get promoted, and move on to another new project, leaving everything to die.
There are many ways to be promoted and launching something new is definitely not the easiest way.
I understand that it's common to see people leave a team or product once they shipped a promo project, but products don't just die because one or two senior people leave a team.
I think that's the whole point though. A lot of the products, if they can even be called that, listed in this article are not even possible to "bet on". I mean, Code Jam?? I think it sucks they shut it down, but annual events and conferences come and go, it's not like people had a right to expect it would go on indefinitely.
I only think about half the items in this list are even possible to invest much time on as an outsider, either a customer or a partner: Stadia (obviously a ton has already been written about that), OnHub (classic "I bought an IoT device that isn't much better than a paperweight after they stopped support), and Google Currents (though that one is marginal - I don't know anyone who used it, also I don't know how seamless the transition to Spaces was).
I think the biggest issue with Google products is that nobody trusts them because they won't stand by any roadmaps. If they had clear, discrete classes of products that they actually stood behind (e.g. "these we'll only guarantee to support for the next 18 months" vs. "these are mature products we stand by"), I think folks would be more OK going into things with eyes wide open. But Google has time and again bullshitted ("Of course we're investing in Stadia..."), or even had things been in beta for years and years when they were obviously mature products, like GMail. And since it's clear Google only really cares about ad revenue, when shit hits the fan and they need to "streamline", like now, anything that doesn't directly support ads like Search, Android, GMail, Chrome, etc. feels like an afterthought.
Now that Google has killed the app, I can’t capture those photos! The app worked fine a month ago, why not let me use it, as it worked offline‽
No one seems to be talking about this issue.
I haven’t found suitable replacement apps to capture photospheres on a (i)Phone. The suggested Street View Studio doesn’t let you capture Photo Spheres!
This is kind of your answer right? It’s not the issue to others that it is to you. If Google sunsetted Search, for example, I think people would talk about that issue.
Laughs/cries in Picasa
These are all projects that google wanted developers to engage with their ecosystem. Routinely inviting devs over to work with you, then kicking them out in the cold, will obviously have consequences.
I remember participating in CodeJam 2003 twenty years ago, and it was such a positive experience that Google was the first company I applied to out of college.
Right now I'm working on a project using a gcp API, and now I'm considering finding an alternative because arbitrarily doing the same work twice is never the most efficient way.
I think it’s probably 90% blogspam and reinforces that anyone sane should very carefully evaluate whether they rely on anything google releases.
Personally, I’ve looked at google phones and networking and home stuff and won’t touch it with a ten foot pole because I don’t want to switch out my router because google decides to kill it.
I agree on the side projects or conferences being shut down and thought the same thing of “why is this even a stand alone app, wouldn’t people just use maps?”
Stadia and CodeJam are more than enough.
Perhaps there wouldn't be "blogspam" like this if Google didn't regularly provided content by shutting down things that people actually loved.
I think I know (resource allocation), but I'd love to be certain.
[1]: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Any company engaging in mass market IoT sales should be compelled, for the sake of consumer confidence and protection, of an "exit plan" to allow fully localized control of these devices -- independent of an upstream server or system.
In their defense, Stadia consisted of a ChromeCast and a controller which are both still useful.
they don't say the same about their wiretap wifi router thingy
Google is probably the last company I would want having any kind of leverage in my hobby.